Control of other devices via TCP

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I am interested in buying a Vera for home automation and security use (lights, PIRs, door sensors) and have 2 questions I hope you can help me with:

  1. I have an Onkyo AV Receiver (Tx NR1008) with multi room capability (not yet set up a multiroom).
    This can be externally controlled via the RS232 or via TCP over its Ethernet
    Is there a Vera capability to send control strings (a sequence of bytes) to a TCP port and receive back status

  2. I cannot find a zwave external alarm siren. I can find internal sirens but not external (with lights)

Please can you help.

Thankyou in advance
Smeghead

2

One of the code wizards will most likely post something here on how you can have Vera send commands via TCP to your receiver. If you are looking for a siren, fortrezz makes a siren/strobe that works well and you can setup scenes to alert you with lights, siren or both depending on the dim level you set the siren to. I have two of them and they work very well

3

Hi smeghead,

Yes, if you have the communication protocol spec, you can write Lua code that Vera can use to communicate two-way with your AV receiver. You could use either serial (RS232 via a USB adapter or via an Ethernet-Serial bridge box) or IPv4 (including TCP and UDP), depending on what is more convenient for your home.

4

http://code.mios.com/trac/mios_onkyo-media-control

5

Yup, my plugin will handle either RS-232, or Ethernet, and “map” it to Vera’s IR-Device commands. you can then use this to Turn on/off or generally control the Receiver - either from MiOS Scenes, or from IR-Device compatible control points (like SQRemote)

It doesn’t [currently] handle the OOBand “Events” that the eISCP protocol can deliver, it just throws them out since the MiOS AV API’s aren’t rich enough.

It would be easy to extend to handle these, and generate MiOS Events (etc) if you wanted to.
eg. When someone manually, or via IR (etc) turns on/off the device, changes channels, volume etc - generate a Event to trigger various scenes.

6

Thats brilliant news, thanks everyone for the quick replies. ;D

For interest, several receiver comms specs are here:
http://www.awe-europe.com/ir_232.html

Thanks again

7

I’ve taken a look at the fortrezz siren
http://www.fortrezz.com/9.html
I read in the user manual that it is “suitable for use in dry, interior locations only”. Is there an external zwave siren with strobe?
I also see that it is suitable for European use but they don’t seem to have a UK/European distributor. I would need a European/UK frequency model.

Thanks